Technology expert Evan Schuman takes an authoritative look at the faults and foibles of enterprise IT.
There is a security ROI dance in retail today. Executives know that they can skimp on security and have a statistically decent chance the company won't get caught by a cyberthief before someone else has their job.
With so many retailers being impacted by cyber attacks, it’s easy to conclude that thieves are necessary for data breaches. Not necessarily. Saks last week made clear that it can breach itself quite efficiently.
When JPMorgan Chase acquired MCX’s payment technology to help with Chase Pay, it likely received a bargain. But a bargain is a bargain only if the value is greater than the cost, no matter how low that cost.
Some highly sensitive data is going to be set loose.
At best, a properly integrated CRM program is complex, given the huge number of systems it touches, or at least should touch. But what happens when a $16 billion, 37-year-old chain wants to tackle CRM for the first time? Whole Foods is about to find ....
The U.S. retail payments space seems to be built on a series of increasingly massive unintended consequences, with moves and rules put in place before anyone has considered what is likely to happen next.
Panera Bread found that mobile payments significantly helped recruit drivers. Why? Digital purchases meant they didn't carry cash, which in turn meant fewer robberies.
For decades, merchants have signed agreements that force them to blindly trust their processors, to a degree they would tolerate in practically no other business relationship.
When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) hit Mastercard and UniRush with a $13 million bill on Feb. 1, it was sending a message that even a temporary denial of consumers' access to their money is unacceptable. In a heads up for IT, C....
When Elias Chavando launched his startup, Rentus.com, last year, his sole major differentiator was simply technology. He knew that there are many businesses in the rental business, but they're overwhelmingly antiquated, with many still using pap....
Holiday stats from Slice Intelligence gave Amazon an amazing 46% of all U.S. e-commerce dollars, which is three percentage points more than the prior year.
Although segmentation is to be applauded, it's not the panacea for the cardholder data problem. Business processes are.
A new facial-recognition trial from KFC China and Baidu has more potential to alienate customers than to help them.
With soaring online fraud, Mastercard and Visa have done what they can to boost in-store crime. They have announced a three-year delay for EMV rollouts at gas stations. May the gas crimes commence.
Are retailers really willing to consider disassociating from associates? I hope that's not the lesson that merchant executives take away from two recent self-checkout moves.
Amazon last week introduced a new approach to in-store technology and strategy, with its Amazon Go experiment. On the plus side, it offers a vision of the possible, with shoppers taking a few seconds to check in to a store on their phone and then the....
Mediating a battle between Amazon and the FTC, a federal judge offers some well-thought-out limits on in-app purchases for children.
Walmart's new attempt to use blockchain to help it contact buyers of recalled, dangerous products faces up to a long-neglected reality. That reality is that almost any meaningful improvement in how quickly and completely retailers contact impact....
Macy's this month made its debut appearance within Alibaba's Singles' Day in China. Well, sort of. Its appearance was only virtual.
Citi has taken a step in the right direction by allowing cardholders to dispute charges from within its mobile app, but one thing it did is certain to aggravate a big chunk of the merchant community.
As we start the sprint to this year's holiday shopping season, I had hoped to start to see the disappearance of the store-centric mentality that has hurt so much of retail for years. Home Depot, however, showed that it's in full-force and k....
When revenue dropped, the CEO blamed a new POS system. That's bad for the company's IT department, but could be good for yours.
Since the earliest days of NFC mobile transactions, one of the most oft-repeated criticisms was, "What happens when the phone battery dies?" Well, one mobile payment system says it has solved that problem, but the truth is that it's on....
Amazon quietly updated its app last week and confessed that its iOS shopping cart would freeze when a shopper tries to switch between apps. It makes one wonder how extensive mobile app testing is these days when this kind of glitch gets by the usuall....
Target has started toying with a voice-recognition device, positioned to compete against Amazon's Alexa, said The Chicago Tribune. The issue is seeing how far Target can push natural language comprehension. This, however, is a misunderstanding o....
For years, retail has clumsily struggled with various merged channel strategies. No changes in commission structure or bonus requirements have proved effective at getting chains to not prioritize in-store compared with e-commerce sales. There is simp....
PCI compliance is Zen-like. It's hard to determine, and even when a letter declares a company PCI-compliant, that declaration can always be retroactively reversed later — such as if you're breached. Yes, when you most need to be able ....
In retail, we have seen merged channel, omnichannel and multi-channel, but here's an interesting twist: We are now seeing concrete marketing evidence from dual-screening, one courtesy of a new eBay U.K. report.
It's that time of year again when retailers prep for the holiday shopping season by bringing in crowds of temp employees. Kohl's just said it was bringing in 69,000 holiday temps, Target bringing in about 70,000, Toys"R"Us eyeing ....
Despite various short-lived efforts over the years, most retail shopping carts are impressively low-tech. But a new patent issued to Walmart paints a futuristic vision, with carts driving themselves from the parking lot right to the customer who call....
On Monday, Chase quietly stopped asking for passwords for sensitive transfers on its mobile app, concluding that a fingerprint-scan is quite sufficient.
In trying to be the world's largest e-tailer by offering almost anything, Amazon has attracted a dedicated group of thieves and resellers trying to slip through the holes in Amazon's bureaucracy. Amazon is now making a good-faith effort to ....
EMV deployment struggles are keeping in-store fraud rates high while pushing online fraud much higher. Worst of both worlds for the moment.
Developers don't visualize from the user's perspective. Nowhere is this more critical than with mobile payments.
Amazon's rationale — there are people who want to work fewer hours at a price of lower pay — is old-fashioned, at attribute not usually associated with the online company.
During an August investors call, Home Depot CEO Craig Menear let loose a stunning stat: 90% of all online returns are processed in-store. Allowing an online return to be boxed and handled by a local store has always been a popular feature, but this i....
The magic of retail centers is on knowing and understanding shoppers better than they know themselves. Amazon has been positively brilliant about this online, but we're now seeing evidence it can bring it in the physical world, too.
The Westfield World Trade Center mall in lower Manhattan, which opened on Aug. 16, requires that all tenants demonstrate that their stores will overflow with mobile and interactive features. I hate to embrace a dictatorial approach, but that's t....
Few retailers have as complicated and painful payment systems as do drugstores. CVS is struggling to do the best it can.
Consider Jack in the Box, which a year ago shut down all of its customer call centers, pushing customer service online.
When Walmart said that it was buying Jet.com for $3 billion, it was widely interpreted as it getting serious about competing with Amazon. That's not what is happening.
At a Fortune 500 company, money — and the number of projects under your command — is power. Target's CIO has a very different view.
Websites use the baseball rule to thwart authentication thieves: Three strikes and you're out. PayPal argues that there's a better way, one that customizes the rules to the user.
With CRM, merchants try to understand shoppers as much as possible. In today's social-media-oriented world, that goes far beyond a list of products purchased and website pages visited.
One small step for man, one giant leap for flying Slurpees. An unexpected winner has emerged in the retail contest for who will be the first to fly a delivery via drone into somebody's backyard: 7-Eleven, of 'They actually deliver?' fa....
Visa has new stats showing that nearly three-quarters of U.S. merchants still can't handle chip cards.
The change from 'MasterCard' to 'Mastercard' is part of a play for a role in a digital marketplace.
An appellate court ruled last week that sites can legally ban people, with a subsequent visit to the site punishable by federal criminal law.
When Starbucks announced this month that its software had rolled out a price increase weeks before it was supposed to, it exposed how easily such a mistake can happen. That's a critical lesson for all of retail.
Consumers love sales, and yet the concept itself is oddly unclear. It's generally based on a product being x% off some other price, but that "other price" is almost always meaningless.
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